The Dangerous Sports Euthanasia Society (Transita) [Paperback]

"Delightful, enormous fun and surprisingly original..." Sara Maitland

'Brilliantly inventive,piercingly accurate about our daily lives while very funny indeed.'

Delightful, enormous fun and surprisingly original

Brilliantly inventive,piercingly accurate about our daily lives while very funny indeed.

A terrific adventure with a most unusual heroine who will steal your heart.

A funny and poignant story about life beginning at seventy five! Great stuff for anyone planning to grow old disgracefully!

'Agnes Borrowdale, seventy-five years old a week on Tuesday, hoisted herself onto the window sill and perched astride it, gripping the wooden frame.' After her escape from the old people's home where she has been placed by her son, Jack, and his new partner, Monica, Agnes's quest to find her grandchildren develops in ways she could never have predicted. Among the new friends she makes on her journey are: Joe, the helpful lorry driver; Molly, the garrulous proprietor of a small, run-down hotel; Gazza, the student whose sprained ankle may have serious consequences for Agnes; and Felix, the retired barrister's clerk, whom Agnes pulls back from attempted suicide. Hoping to rekindle his desire to live, she invents the Dangerous Sports Euthanasia Society, but soon fears that this falsehood, having acquired a momentum of its own, will end in tragedy. Meanwhile, Jack, frantically trying to trace his missing mother, spends a night in a police cell on a drunk-driving charge, while an over-zealous young policeman begins to suspect him of a more serious crime.

Transita books reflect the lives of mature women. Contemporary women with rich stories to tell, stories that explore the truths and desires that colour their lives.

I love reading. I love the way a well written book can tell me things I didn't realise I knew already. What has amazed me is that writing a novel can have the same effect. I wanted to produce a story that might help to
shift the negative attitude towards old age that's so prevalent in many western cultures, but I wasn't too sure at the start what exactly it was that I was trying to convey, let alone how I would go about doing so.

It was the characters in this novel who helped to clarify my thoughts. Their ages range from three to seventy-five, and they weren't in the least bit interested in ideas, as such. They were just muddling through the usual
complexities of ordinary life that arise from divorce. I felt that an older central character embarking on a quest to find her grandchildren could strike a chord with many readers, but once Agnes Borrowdale had climbed out of the window of the Harmony Home for the Young at Heart, I had only a hazy notion of what she would be doing next and who she would meet along the way, apart from Felix, for whom she invents The Dangerous Sports Euthanasia Society. This concept came to me originally when I was approaching my fiftieth birthday and resolved to take up more challenges as I grew older, rather than sink into a slow decline with my increasing years.

Since then, I've forced myself into a reasonable state of fitness by regular trips to the local gym, and have dallied with abseiling and paragliding. The mental challenge of weaving my range of quite serious themes into an entertaining story seems to have given me a bit more of an inkling, perhaps, into what makes this amazing, scary, crazy world go round. And if you have even half as much fun with the ideas and characters in this novel as
I've had in writing about them it will be a great read!

Christine Coleman spent her childhood in the Sussex country side, and her late teens and early twenties in Dublin, where she learned to enjoy Guinness and climb mountains while gaining a degree in English. She now works as manager of an Adult Education Centre in Birmingham, and devotes most of her spare time to writing fiction and poetry. Together with a group of three other poets under the name of Late Shift, she has given performances at poetry festivals and arts centres around the country, including the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2003. Her own poetry collection, Single Travellers, was published by Flarestack in 2004. The Dangerous Sports Euthanasia Society is the first of her novels to be published. The initial germ of the idea for this took hold while she was dangling from a paraglider 3,000 feet above a lagoon on an island in the Indian Ocean. She believes that the saying, 'Life begins at forty,' doesn't go far enough, and feels that as we get older we can gain inspiration from seeing people in their seventies or eighties rise to the challenge of new ventures. For more information about Christine and her work visit www.transita.co.uk